Adobe Adapts Education Licensing for New Creative Cloud

Adobe today revealed that it's abandoning its decade-old Creative Suite in favor of Creative Cloud. As part of the transition, the company is also revamping its education licensing for primary, secondary, and post-secondary institutions.

Launched about a year ago, Creative Cloud is Adobe's distribution point for native desktop and mobile applications. Applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro can be downloaded from Creative Cloud to a local computer or mobile device, just like a regular electronic distribution model. However, Creative Cloud, unlike Adobe's past electronic distribution efforts, is subscription-based. Users do not pay a single license fee for an application or suite. Rather, the service allows users to subscribe to and manage their Adobe software, with updates delivered as part of the subscription package. The service also provides storage and an online portfolio service called Behance.

According to Adobe, the company will continue to support Creative Suite 6 but will not release any future versions of the Creative Suite or any of the individual Creative Suite applications. Instead, the company will only release Creative Cloud versions of those applications. In fact, at the Adobe MAX convention in Los Angeles today, Adobe unveiled five so-called "CC" applications: Adobe Photoshop CC, InDesign CC, Illustrator CC, Dreamweaver CC, and Premiere Pro CC.

Photoshop CC incorporates features previously only found in the Extended version of Photoshop, including 3D tools. The new release also adds:

Conditional actions;

The ability to save type styles as presets;

Faster previews in 3D painting;

New Smart Object support;

Camera shake reduction filter;

CSS attribute copying;

Camera Raw 8 support;

Editable rounded rectangles and multiple shape and path selection;

Improvements to 3D effects and workflow; and

A new Smart Sharpen tool.

InDesign CC, the latest version of Adobe's page layout and desktop publishing tool, gets enhancements in the areas of performance, workflow, and UI. It also includes a QR code generator and various font tools, such as search, instant preview, filter, and favorites.

Illustrator CC likewise primarily adds workflow and UI enhancements. It also includes a new type tool that allows users to manipulate individual characters as if they were objects.

Dreamweaver CC, the update to Adobe's WYSIWYG HTML editor, includes a new CSS designer that provides visual tools for manipulating CSS properties and seeing the results in real time.

For the education sector, Adobe today rolled out the Education Enterprise Agreement (EEA), a new licensing program that provides volume discounts based on the number of FTE staff and faculty at a school, college, or university. As Adobe described it: "The Education Enterprise Agreement program is an easy-to-manage, term-based licensing program that gives educational institutions access to the new CC apps. With this program, institutional customers can have the creative tools they need to be more productive, foster creativity in teaching and learning, and help their students develop essential digital communication skills." Specific pricing was not available at press time.

Individual and team subscription are also available for teachers and students. Creative Cloud Student & Teacher provides discounts for individual teachers and students, with plans starting at $19.99 per month with an annual commitment. A Teams subscription is also available for students and teachers, providing 100 GB of storage and various other services for $39.99 per month.

According to Adobe, the updates to the Creative Cloud will be available in June. Additional details can be found on the Creative Cloud site.

About the Author

David Nagel is editorial director, education for 1105 Media's Public Sector Media Group and editor-in-chief of THE Journal. A 22-year publishing veteran, Nagel has led or contributed to dozens of technology, art and business publications.

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